Timezone Change

For some reason earlier this year the powers at be decided to change how daylight savings time is done here in the US. This of course causes problems for any computer that tries to deal with daylight savings by its self. According to Microsoft patches for Windows XP and 2003 should be out for the December round of patches, anyone using something older is out of luck ;-(. I expect Linux users will also get patches as you normally do (depends on your distro, I think Gentoo has had a patch for quite awhile, not sure about the others).

If you run a Windows CE or Pocket PC (Windows Mobile) device things are a little more exciting. You need to patch the registry. Microsoft has an inf which you can compress into a .cab and install or you can use this one (WARNING: Only works with Windows Mobile, look here for CE) that someone was kind enough to post (thanks PocketPCThoughts).

It will be awhile before this is a problem, but I thought I'd mention it while I was thinking about it from the PPCThoughts article. Vista will ship with the new settings.

IE7

If anyone is keeping track of Microsoft, it is worth noting that they released the final (if it can be called that) version of IE7 to the public. I have only used the version incorporated into Vista, but it is a vast improvement over IE6 (came out during the Win98 era after all). IE7 does most of the things Mozilla and Opera have been doing for years; the most significant? tabbed browsing. It also handles RSS and keeps track of some phishing sites. So, if you must use IE, I would go get IE7 here. If not, check out Firefox or Opera, or SeaMonkey, or any of the many other good browsers, and ditch IE6.